I go to HVCC (Hudson Valley Community College) in Troy, NY, and I want to clarify.

Steam works if you try to connect early in the morning (before 8am). You can keep your connection the rest of the day if you sleep or hibernate your laptop when not using it. Not sure why this is the case, but it happens on off-campus classes tied to HVCC's network, too (particularly their TEC-SMART location in Malta, NY).

Any time after 8am, and up to 5-6pm, Steam spends a good ten minutes trying to connect before timing out.

I've talked to the help desk and they didn't even know what Steam was. It's not firewall related, since HVCC uses port triggering, etc and keeps ports other than 80,8080 and 443 open. QoS is probably the cause.

I also can't connect to my home FTP server; except in the early morning on the college network. Hope this halps.